


Death Becomes Him

by StellarRequiem



Series: We Caught a Glimpse of Heaven Once [1]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Ghost Rider (Comics), Punisher (Comics), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: A N G S T ON THE LEVEL OF OPERA, Angst, BALLS OUT LEVELS OF ETERNAL LOVE, F/M, Ghost Rider - Freeform, Macabre, Marvel Universe, Mystery, Noire - Freeform, Post-Canon, Post-Punisher s.1, angst porn and foreboding, devil-dealings, kastle - Freeform, many references, meltdowns, no really but just trust me, playing fast and loose with marvel lore in an MCU canon world, spiritual crises
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-05-18 19:56:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 20,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14859252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: "I’d do anything to have you back.”A voice layered with the breaking, cracking sounds of wood on a fire, deep and hollow yet piercing, hot-cold, seething, answers: “Anything?”And Karen is back in Sunday school. Where the angels were terrifying portends, and the devils were cruel tricksters. Beware of temptations, they’d warned her then. Beware the fruits offered by hell. Beware strange, too-good offers. It all comes back to her in an instant, and as if her youth leader were standing in front of her, able to hear, all she can wonder is,but isn’t it wrong to lie?So she answers, “Yes.”**Frank Castle has been missing for 30 days when Karen encounters New York's newest enhanced, a being more likely born in Hell than on Earth, who may be her only lead on Frank. The trick is surviving long enough to hunt him down--and bearing the truth of what comes after.





	1. PROLOGUE

**Author's Note:**

  * For [homesickblues (wispyoongi)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wispyoongi/gifts).



_Jesus Christ, that can't have been real._

Karen drips down the door she has her back to, sliding like molasses on a hot day until she's seated with her arms around her knees, trying to take relaxing breaths and getting nothing but the musty detergent and city smells of her own slacks. Even with her shins to hold on to, her hands are shaking.

_There’s no way. There’s no way._

And yet the terror had been so palpable, so _familiar_ . . . Not the kind fear alerted by evil. Nothing like the trumped-up horrors of demons and devils in the long services Mom used to drag them to; rather, it was a terror of the kind she’d secretly harbored for angels. _Fear not,_ they would always say in the Bible, but tell that to Sodom and Gomorrah. Or Mary. Devils and demons might want to wound or twist or kill or torture, but she can’t remember a story in which they were a harbinger of disaster, or a stand-in psychopomp. Hell never started a crusade. Hell didn’t drown the very people it made. Hell never killed children in their beds by the thousands to punish one man.

Enormous. Inescapable. Leagues beyond human reasoning. Godlike.

_That_ was the fear she felt. That’s the fear she’s still feeling.

_But it knew about Frank._


	2. M.I.A.

_6/25- “Subway safety boost costs historic neighborhood” Councilwoman A.L. anon int. follow-up notes:_

  * _Repair protocol from 2012, confirm 8 mill. Pricetag?_
  * _Disrepair tracks v. collapses, difference?_
    * _Military contractor follow up Q: MOPs and “Bunker Buster” tech—how safe can tunnel be against superior technology?_
  * _Historical register status denial circumstan_ |



The cursor still blinking in place, the addendum goes unfinished. A second round of firm, succinct, and unforgiving knocking rattles Karen’s door in its frame. An “I know you’re home” second round.

_What the hell?_

She slinks toward the door, pulling her purse from the table as she goes. The cold metal of the pistol there kisses her fingers without sympathy as if to say _well, get it over with,_ though she'd like to think that's an overreaction.  After all, it’s 7:00pm. It could be a confused delivery guy, for all she knows. Hell, it could even be a _friend._ In theory she still has those.

In _theory,_ she’s just being paranoid, and the tightness in her gut is for nothing.

The eyes she meets through the peep-hole turn out to be familiar, but they put her no less on edge.

Karen cracks the door without undoing the chain. “Special Agent Madani?”

Though her hair is a little longer than Karen remembers, nothing much else about the woman has changed, right down to the intensity in her eyes and the pucker at the corner of her mouth as if she were holding back a secret, or a curse, or spit meant for someone’s face. _Not a social visit, I guess._

“Ms. Page. Can I have a word?”

“I don’t know . . . is it the kind of word that comes with a warrant?”

“Not yet.”

_Easy way or hard way. Got it._ Karen sighs and releases the chain.

“Come on in,” she says. “Can I get you a beer or something?”

“No, thanks.”

“On the clock then.”

“Not necessarily,” Madani’s eyes flash a wary something. “This is . . . a _personal_ visit seems like an inappropriate turn of phrase, but let’s just say I’m not here on anyone’s authority but my own. And all I want to know is if you’ve seen Cast . . . _iliogne_ recently.”

Karen can feel herself bristling. She tries to breathe it back, but she can still hear tightness in her voice when she answers.

“Sorry, but how is that any of your business?”

Madani doesn’t respond with posturing or protocol. She just looks into Karen’s face with a tiredness suddenly palpable in her ever-tight expression before releasing a delicate sigh.

“It isn’t. In fact, ‘Pete Castiliogne’ is expressly _not_ my business. But you could say I have a soft spot. I . . . check in from time to time.”

“You’re tracking him without authorization!?”

“I use resources at my disposal, Ms. Page, to be sure a volatile individual who’s been through a hell of a lot hasn’t ended up in trouble. That is, once in a while, _I look to see if he’s alive_. That’s all.” She says it as if to be reassuring, but the sternness of her tone sets a fire under Karen all the same.

“That is _still_ ,” she retorts, not _quite_ through her teeth _,_ “illegal.”

“So is everything else that’s ever happened to him, from what I can tell. Look, I just like to know he’s . . . out there. Which is exactly why I’m here.”

“So you can track his personal life that much more?”

“So I can track _anything at all,_ ” Madani snaps, and the tightening in Karen’s gut finally lets loose. She feels her stomach fall through her feet.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean Castle has dropped off of my radar for over a week. He’s not coming to work, he isn’t coming in and out of his apartment, and he sure as hell hasn’t come to us or Lieberman. That leaves—”

“Me.” Karen breathes it more than says it.

“That was my thinking. So, has he contacted you, or not?”

Karen can’t quite make the answer come out of her mouth.

Instead, she whirls around to the table where she’d set aside her purse, diving into it with both hands, looking not for metal, but a plastic case. She yanks out her phone and dials with shivering fingers while Madani watches first in irritation, then wild-eyed understanding. She watches Karen call. She watches Karen call again.

“Nothing?”

“Phone’s off . . . the hell does this mean?! Is he into something? Is he ok!? Has someone been by his place?” Not much of an interview for her part: her tone is nothing but panic. “Talk to me, Madani—”

“No one has been by. I don’t have the jurisdiction to tip anyone off, besides, for all I knew—”

“He’s not here. He never _stays_ here, he—I’m going to his place. If he’s not there, who do I call?”

“Sorry?”

“He’s a felon in the, I don’t know, clandestine-spook version of witness protection, the last people I want to send after him is a bunch of NYPD beat cops. So, if he’s not there, if he’s, if he’s—” _if he’s . . ._ “who do I call? Who do I give the tip?”

_What do I do if Frank is missing?_


	3. Stages of Grief

_7/22- “Queens Devil" prelim. Notes_

  * _Witness desc: “the devil, the devil, on fire, hell in its eyes. Looked into my soul, felt it burn my soul,” Jackson Aaron, 22, dealer from NJ in 5/20 statement. “Like a guy burned up,” Lucas Merit, resident of adjacent neighborhood saw perp from distance 7/10_
  * _NYPD: “At this time there is no evidence indicating the so called ‘Queens Devil” Is anything beyond a self-styled vigilante utilizing scare tactics on perceived perpetrators.” Deny concerns of enhanced in 7/21 statement_
  * _NYPD: Suspect ID remains unknown in 7/22 statement_



The truth of the matter is that the world is sick of superpowers. But the junkie this “Devil” spooked blew up half a block in Queens trying to destroy his home meth lab because he needed to “repent,” so while the name the great New York gossip chain has ripped off of Matt for this newcomer reeks of clickbait creepypasta, and while the last thing anyone _wants_ to read about is another enhanced problem-child, at the end of the day, this is a story. And she’s the one who’s pulled the straw of telling it.

Whatever gold or garbage it ends up becoming, though, at least it’s something else to think about: ‘Pete Castiliogne’ has been formally missing for 27 days.

Not dead, not in jail, missing. No trace of him in hospitals, no trace of him on the street. No punishings. No victory marches from his old enemies. No nothing. Being gone this long means he’s presumed dead in all the useless legal senses of things, but somehow, she just can’t wrap her head around that idea. It has to be something else. He has to be _out there._

_He must be in trouble . . ._

That thought, so frantic a month ago, has dulled. But it still cuts her every time it runs through her brain, feeling _exactly_ how a dull blade should. Her hand still flinches for her phone every time it crosses her mind, though no one ever calls. Well, Lieberman occasionally checks on her. He and Karen are the only friends of any kind Frank has, so every time they arrive at _nothing_ in their search for him, they pause to tell each other. Or, in his case, worry for the other. Lieberman has a family to get through this with.  Karen has a job. Sometimes a depressing one, even if right now, it happens to be useless legends of a flame-broiled skeleton no one wants to read.

 _Never change, New York._ For all the ugliness this place produces, for everything terrible its concrete jungle masks, for all the lives it swallows up—at least there’s always something new to distract.

 

*

 

_7/23-“Queens Devil” back-issue findings:_

_1972-1997: 3 articles reference phantom/devil described as man on fire._

  * _Grace Stone—interview 1975. Stone, from Harlem, was attacked by three strange men outside travelling carnival when man on motorcycle intervened, apparently wielding flamethrower. Stone described a skeletal being, news coverage (biased, Black woman, 1975) attributed visage to trick helmet sometimes featured in cycle show. No description of bike, either trick or other type_



  * _Malia Jameson—interview 1992. Jameson arrested alongside six members of defunct neighborhood gang near Cypress Hill Cemetery, Brooklyn on December 3 rd, 1980. Jameson, not a gang initiate, reported running from being in the cemetery dressed like member of biker gang “with no colors,” but on fire. “Rider” used heated chain to disarm multiple members of the gang, looked at Jameson and friends but did not restrain. Instead focused on disarmed initiates while Jameson ran. Initiates later found shaking, weeping, confessed to multitude of crimes_



  * _Rosario Flores—interview 1993. Flores lived adjacent to Queens side of same cemetery, Cypress Hill. Heard gunfire on 4/12/93 which abruptly stopped. Looked outside and saw figure matching description of 1992 suspect, also riding large motorcycle. Described “singlehanded” disarmament and incapacitation of group of 6-12 suspects later connected to string of violent grand theft auto_



_Commonalities: “hellish" being looks like man on fire, burnt potentially down to bone. Known to deter crime and punish violent offenders: killers, drug dealers, rapists, etc. On aa motorbike._

It doesn’t sound as ridiculous without the skeleton piece, but its an undeniable, recurring description. The MO is so plausible, so familiar— _Like if Frank were a Halloween prop with a motorcycle—_ that it stings, except, of course, for one thing: none of the encounters describe the “devil,” or, as it’s referred to in the older articles, the “rider,” ever killing a single perp. From rapists to murderers, no one in any old story she can find, any search she plugs into Google, ever _dies._

_Why should they?_

Karen ignores the persistent question. Of _course_ no one should have to die for their crimes. Outside of the system. _The same system that would have hung Frank but stuck Fisk in prison just to spill back out after that . . ._ thing _with the aliens—_

_Karen, stop._

Grief is a loud and stupid thing. It turns a person backward on their own life, down the same old paths, the same old debates. At the end of the day, if her deepest fear for Frank is that he’s back out there killing and maiming, it’s not because of some great moral pedestal she’s stuck standing on: it’s because it means he lost. Frank Castle may be dead, but Pete Castiglione had— _has—_ a future. And no future can survive the flood of blood he’s capable of. The rivers of Egypt have nothing on the Punisher.

 

*

One other possibility remains.

Frank has never balked at killing, but his motivation for it is preventative. “Punisher” is a misnomer, punishing isn’t all vengeance, it’s also removing perceived wrongdoers from the fabric of the world so they can’t do what they’ve done again. Or worse. If there were a way to do that without death, without a fallible justice system . . . what would stop him holding off? Anything? _Do you even know?_

A week ago, she would have laughed at the idea of Frank _not_ pulling a trigger. But there’s something to this weird, vanishing, Halloween demon figure she’s been chasing that’s so laughable on the surface but so sobering in reality: whatever it is he does to people, it works. Of four reported victims in the last two weeks, every one of them has willfully submitted to corrective action. The destruction wrought by the meth dealer is turning out to be a fluke instead of the rule—and if “obliterate the source of the wickedest thing I’ve ever done” is the worst consequence to come of an encounter . . . Matt and Frank alike could probably bear to learn something from whatever skele-guy is doing. And Frank is nothing if not smart—the idea that maybe he’s already learning won’t leave her alone.

Because it’s a hell of a lot easier to believe he’s changed every inch of his methodology than it is to admit he may be dead.

It’s now been one full month.

*

“Karen.”

“Huh?” she jumps a little in her chair, not because Ellison’s arrival startles her, but because shifting from focus back to the mundane world of her desk is like switching realities. “Oh, hey. What’s up?”

“This pitch. I was thinking ‘current events’ when I stuck you on this . . . what are you calling it, ‘ _Night Rider?’_ thing. A thirty year history of Brooklyn’s favorite Halloween legend wasn’t really what I had in mind.”

“It’s hardly a _history._ It seems relevant to mention that there’s a precedent here, this new guy could be—”

“A copycat, yeah, I read it. I just can’t say I’m impressed. Of all the stories to go full fourth estate with, I don’t feel like _skeleton on motorbike_ is the thing to pick fights with the NYPD about.”

That’s . . . actually funny. She almost manages to laugh aloud.

“Oh, come on. I am not picking fights—”

“There are two implications to this story as is, one says this ghost, devil guy is a copycat of crimes unacknowledged in police statements, or worse, number two is that it’s the same person and the NYPD is willingly downplaying the resurgence of a . . .” he glances down at the tablet in his hand, leaning a little more lazily in her office doorframe, “apparently pretty substantial enhanced individual with a history of soaking up bullets like a sponge. _That’s_ a fight, Karen.”

She shifts in her chair, leaning back to study her boss, wishing she felt as confident as she’s trying to look.

“That’s all just implied, I’m not—”

“If this is your definition of _implied,_ you need a refresher on high school English.”

“Excuse me!?”

“Karen. This is—this is about as subtle as, well . . .” her face must be saying something, because he pauses to sigh, and strolls over to her desk. He sets his tablet down in front of her as she pushes her laptop away, pointing at it as he continues to speak in a gentler tone. “Look, it’s not awful. But I’ve seen you do ten times this depth with a surgeon’s touch, and _this_ whole section . . .”

She’s already re-reading as he talks.

“It . . . Could afford to go.”

Ellison turns to look at her, waiting out her sigh. She has to close her eyes to answer him.

“Ok,” she acquiesces, “I still stand by the story, but the editing is shit, you’re right. I’ll go in and clean up the conjecture.”

She opens her eyes to find him shaking his head.

“Readers like a good theory, that’s why they read you. You’re not . . . _wrong._ I just can’t run it like _this_. Give me less or give me more, just . . . not the conspiracy theory crap. We’re not the _Bugle_.” That earns a barely laugh from her.

“Right. Yeah. Sorry. I got ahead of myself, I guess.”

There is a pause, and then, following a deep breathe not like nor unlike a sigh, with a brief, awkward firmness, Ellison’s hand comes down on her shoulder.

“Karen.”

She twists to look at him, almost escaping his palm, in surprise. He’s touched her, what? Maybe three times in all the time she’s worked here, all the shit she’s seen?

“Look,” he says, unable to make eye-contact while his hand is on her, looking around the room as if the answer to the human condition were written on the ceiling. “I don’t know what’s going on in your life right now. I know you took a week, and I know you’ve been pensive even by your standards. What I don’t know is what other mystery has you preoccupied right now that isn’t the one you’ve been writing about. But I’m guessing it’s a doozy, and if you need a longer sabbatical, just tell me, ok? Shit happens. I don’t need to know what. But if being here is just one more thing on your plate—”

“ _No._ Absolutely not.” Her tone must be either sharp or desperate because he looks at her so fast it could give him whiplash. “I’m . . . fine.”

“Oh, please—”

“And if I _weren’t_ fine, this would keeping me sane, and I’d rather not have it ripped out from under me.” _Like everything else._

“Ah.”

Ellison sighs as he lets her retreat from under his hand. She doesn’t stand, but swirls in her chair to face him head on. Somewhere along the line, she’s arrived at a place where she can do this and still feel like they’re eye to eye. She really could take off as long as she wanted. He’d have her back. Working here is everything Nelson and Murdock’s family drama atmosphere couldn’t be, everything a cubicle job could never be.

She’d be a fool to let it go.

“I’ll get you a clean copy of this by end of day, Ellison.”

He looks at her with the kind of abject exasperation that belongs on her father, or would, if Dad had ever been _like that_. It’s an “I don’t know what to do with you and never will,” look. _Fair enough._

“Shit. Fine, whatever. Just, don’t snap on me, ok?”

“No promises,” she says, throwing up a smile that earns her nothing but rolled eyes and his removing himself from the room. Karen lets the door swing shut behind him before putting her face in her hands.

*

 

Foggy, in some ways, has become a long shot. But he makes it to the bar Friday night looking only slightly work-hungover, happy enough talking about Marci and the ongoing insanity of law. It’s all so familiar, so like-old-times, that when he asks how she’s holding up, out it comes. Mostly. There’s a delicacy even now about Frank. She keeps “Pete” to herself. Her _stories_ , however . . .

She word vomits every miserable not-quite-clickbait-not-quite-real-journalism detail of that damned skeleton all over him.

“Ok, ok,” slow down, Foggy finally interjects. “You can’t get over this, what’d you call it, ‘ _Night Rider’_ story? That usually means you’re onto something. So, what’s the problem?”

“The _problem_ is that any reporting on it belongs in the _Enquirer_. It’s a motorcycle-riding skeleton-on-fire, for the love of God.”

“. . . Yeah,” he sighs, pausing to pull from his beer, “pretty badass.”

Karen snorts. “More like ridiculous.  But the thing is, it’s a pretty potent individual, and maybe has a history here. And it’s not like it’s physically hurting anyone, and that’s the weird part, but it’s also why there’s no reason to care this much. This is more . . . whatsisname, Spider-Man than it is concerning vigilante stuff, even if it is an actual overpowered hellion . . . so why is it this hard to let it go?”

Foggy hums to himself before turning pointedly to his beer. This pull of the drink is much longer, so she knows that something no one wants to say or hear is inbound before it comes out of his mouth.

“Ok, don’t hate me,” he says slowly, “but maybe you’re so into this because if it were just a little less Spider-Guy, it’d . . . be . . . uh, _familiar._ Maybe you’re looking too close at this because you’re hoping to see someone else?”

“F—” she catches her own outburst, but not soon enough. Foggy’s eyebrows fly up his forehead, forming a few wrinkles that didn’t used to be there.

“Fff . . .? _Frank?_ As in _Castle?_ Karen, what? I was thinking _Matt._ You’re shitting me with that, right?”

“ _Castle_ is still— _probably—_ alive. And I kind of built a career on him, so. It’s my business whether he’s still out there and what he’s doing.”

“Jesus,” Foggy says, and feigns waving for a shot. He seems started when the bartender immediately produces one for real. Karen pulls it out from under him.

Having downed it—whisky—she declares “Look.”

“Look?”

“I’ve had my life saved now by a couple of vigilantes. Castle was one of them, more than once.”

“So, what, you have Stockholm Syndrome?”

Karen turns a real glare on him for the first time in a long time. A small part of her loves watching him shrink from it.

“Getting invested is my weakness. Sue me,” she grumbles.

“I really do prefer defense.”

As fast as it came on, her anger fades. She lets a smile crack her worry-stiff face open. “Touché.”

Minutes pass. Foggy finishes his beer and, in retaliation for the stolen shot, takes the last of hers, too.

“Can I give you some unsolicited advice on the Castle thing?” he finally blurts.

“Oh, this should be something.”

“Yeah, maybe. So here goes nothing: let’s say for a second the guy is out there, and alive. He seems to be minding his own business if he is. That means it’s out of all our hands, yours too. Now, if he comes out of the wood work, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure you’d be the first to know,” he throws her a bit of a withering look, with that. “So, as contrary as it is to your nature, maybe you should be putting some serious thought into letting go until that happens. You know what they say, ‘if you love something,’ or, you know, have a weird reporter Stockholm relationship with it, ‘let it go. If it’s right, it’ll come back.” Or something.”

Karen turns to her beer, and, finding it empty, also finds she has nothing she can say in response. She’s finally out of words.

“And,” Foggy ventures to add, as gingerly as he’s capable of, “if he’s _not_ out there,” _don’t say that. Don’t say that—_ “then maybe you need to let yourself grieve. _I_ don’t really get it but, if you need to get drunk and cry about the Punisher sometime, call me and I’ll still be there.”

“I don’t think I’m ready to cry about him,” she mutters. “Lately, I’ve been pretty done with crying in general.”

“Fair enough. But don’t lose yourself chasing shadows, you know? Or uh, skeleton ghost guys.”

“That will _never_ stop sounding ridiculous.”

“ _Badass.”_

“Whatever you say, Foggy.”

He straightens up in his chair, all puffed up as he declares once more, with maximum melodrama: “Bad. Ass.”

 

*

 

 _Mourning Frank._ The words feel so foreign and the concept is revolting. So why she does what she does, why she loads a bottle into her purse to pour out (or maybe sip off of despite being already plenty under the influence of that last shot with Foggy), and takes off for Saint Michael’s cemetery, is a mystery even to her.

But off she goes.


	4. Hell's Sympathies

_This is a good way to get murdered,_ Karen thinks as she hoofs it up the hill to the headstone. It’s one in the morning. _Good time for_ mourning _. . ._

_Oh God, I’m rhyming. I am . . . so drunk._

She’s been hitting the flask since she got in the cab. A month’s worth of drinking her pain condensed into one night—she’s been trying not to hit the hard stuff too hard at risk of ruining her work—and she’s so far gone she could believe in Santa Claus again. Only, things are strangely sharp, as well. She can’t feel the cold. But she can see the smallest, loveliest, most horrible details. Graves with flowers. Graves with fake flowers that never rot that still look shabby, the families gone for who knows how long. Graves broken or wind-worn and lost to time. Graves from yesterday. Graves of criminals. Graves of heroes. Graves of children. The exact patterns of moss or rust or the ways the names wear with time. All of this she can pick out though the grass blurs ahead of her. Of course Frank’s empty grave is clear as day.

The waxing moon helps, too. It glances at sharp angles through headstones and ornate monuments to the dead and their beliefs, casting beams of black and pale blue over everything she sees. A highlight on the headstone falls like a path to approach it. That empty monument to the disappeared.

Frank’s headstone has existed long enough now to be painted with rain streaks, but no other wear. Beside it lie the far less empty plots belonging to the rest of the Castle family, which Karen stumbles around with a wide berth and a solemn nod.

“I hope . . . s’ok I’m here,” she whispers. _I hope it’s ok that I loved him, too._ When no undead horrors or righteous lightning bolts appear, she turns back to Frank’s stone, content in her alcohol-blurred heart that she has the Castles’ collective blessing. She has their permission . . .  to mourn.

Though, now it’s time to talk, she can’t even slur.

She drags a hefty drink from the flask to burn out the lump in her throat, but stands there for easily a minute in sober-time before she can choke “drink?” and upturns what little of the whisky remains into the grass. She does not sink to her knees after it. She does not collapse and wail. But the lump remains, and it gags her every word.

“Damn it.” A whisper, first. “ _Damn it,_ Frank. You had another chance. You had a whole other chance. And you . . . what happened . . . to you? _Where are you?”_

His headstone doesn’t answer.

“ _Damn it!_ ” God only knows how loud she’s yelling. How long until some caretaker comes out here and drags her to a cab, or a cop car and a night in the drunk tank? But it’s all coming out now, fast and loud and bubbling. Her crystal clear vision swims.

“How could you _do_ this? How could you just walk away? _You had a life, Frank!_ You had . . . y’had David, you even sorta’f had Madani, you had—you had _me,_ we were going to go for ziti, we were going to—I— _how could you?_ Who gave you the _fucking right_ to . . . to disappear? To, to get yourself . . . lost or, or or— _” or—_

And now it’s a whisper: “Or dead.”

And now her knees are in the grass.

And now she can’t scream because the sobs ripping up her throat tear chunks out of all her words.

“Why didn’t you come to me?” she bubbles, she hiccups, “why, ‘f you were in trouble, didn’t you . . . when have I ever—I give you a hard time, Frank, but I have never, I will always, I—I—you could have come to me. _Why didn’t you ever come to me?”_

Sloppy with drunk and grief, she slides from her knees onto her right hip, legs haphazardly tangled off to her left. She has to catch herself with her hand, but her elbow gives out along with the rest of her. So she sobs into her hand bent-elbowed in the grass in front of an empty grave that smells like whisky. And, somewhere in the mess of that, she finds she’s started to beg. Unintelligibly. She’s crying too hard for it to matter if anyone in heaven, hell, or earth is listening.

“ _Come back. Please come back. Be alive. Make me wrong. I don’t care what you did. I don’t care how you are. Just come back. Just come back. Just come back—”_

From there it’s only sobs. There are no words left. Maybe none of them mattered anyway. Their most important exchanges never used them, after all: a song turned up high on a car radio. A gunshot from above. A body covering hers. A hug he wasn’t expecting. A forehead hot with exertion and clammy with sweat and cooling blood against hers, so much more intimate than a kiss, in a cold corrugated elevator. A knock on her door and a shaggy haired visage of a man looking almost nervous to see her. Flowers, just once, not for any signal, but because they “looked good in her window,” handed off to her in loaded silence. The spilling of so many liters of blood.

Maybe the wordless, drunk sobbing is just in keeping with tradition.

When she runs out of tears, though, she grasps, through clearing vision and a foggy mind, for a few more words all the same.

“All the stories in the world, Frank, and you walked into mine . . . Believe it or not, I’ll always be thankful for that. And—”

She swallows a few times before she can get it out.

“I’d do anything to have you back.”

Alone in St. Michael’s after what might be twenty minutes, might be an hour of crying into the dark hours, the last thing she expects for this declaration is a response. But from somewhere uphill, out of sight behind Frank’s headstone, one comes just to chill her.

A voice layered with the breaking, cracking sounds of wood on a fire, deep and hollow yet piercing, hot-cold, seething, for a moment at the sound of it, she is stone sober. It asks “Anything?”

And Karen is back in Sunday school. Where the angels were terrifying portends, and the devils were cruel tricksters. Beware of temptations, they’d warned her then. Beware the fruits offered by hell. Beware strange, too-good offers not achieved through good works and prayer and quiet suffering. It all comes back to her in an instant, and as if her youth leader were standing in front of her, able to hear, all she can wonder is, _but isn’t it wrong to lie?_

So she answers, “Yes.”

She answers, “oh God, yes.”

And she struggles to her feet.

*

 

It doesn’t look the way she pictured. For one, there’s no bike. No biker’s jacket or chaps, either. Just a scorched white tank top under a black button-down bleeding tongues of fire with every slight movement of the body or of the air. What might even be jeans. Heavy, dark boots. Gloves. And so much bone. Radius and ulna standing out beneath sleeves, bathed in a halo of uncontained flame. The arches of clavicles and the broad head of the breastbone, vertebrae stacked like God’s perfect Jenga game. And the face. The empty bone where the it should be, enveloped in towering flame, burning white and blue hot at the scalp. The heat has scalded cracks and deep color into the bones, like something shattered and pulled together again by the fire. Kintsugi forged in hell.

The “Queens Devil,” “Rider,” “Demon”—

 It stands in the long shadow of a tall crucifix marker, painfully bright in the dark. The story she’s been chasing _right there_ , in the utter-lack-of flesh, and her heart is frozen in awesome useless terror. She can’t speak to it. She can’t demand a story from it. In its eyes is a too-bright light defiant of the capabilities of any natural fire, pinpoint supernovas in black sockets that are all she can see, all she can feel—hellfire eyes and the cold spreading out from her heart all the way to her fingers. Its gaze rips a scream from her like a reflex.

Somewhere in her mind, some lizard-brain survival instinct clicks on.

 _Think_ , it says. _Danger._ Because oh, could this thing do damage. This Rider, her Rider, is no prank, no costume. She can feel that in her bones, echoing the sensation of the hotcold flame. _Run._

Tripping as she turns, scrambling and sliding down the hill, she does.

Karen doesn’t take the path. She runs straight, dodging and tripping into markers, through landscaping, at some point she hears her ankle pop and snap but she can’t feel it. It’s buried under too much alcohol and existential dread. At the base of the hill she collides face-first with the fence. The world quaking from the impact to her head, her nose feeling for a moment like so much rubber stuck to her face, it’s in a state of delirium that she climbs up a shrub—gaining no more than 8 inches when she’s done sinking into its brambly depths—and yanks herself awkwardly over the railing, catching herself repeatedly on the wrought iron on her way down.

She keeps running until she all but collides with a cab, and there in the back of it, starts sobbing all over again.

“Miss? Did something happen to you? You, maybe want me to uh. . . I don’t know, take you to the police station?”

All she can do is shake her head.

“It’s nothing like that.”

It’s nothing like anything.


	5. Deals and Devils

_Jesus Christ, that can't have been real._

Karen drips down the door she has her back to, sliding like molasses on a hot day until she's seated with her arms around her knees, trying to take relaxing breaths and getting nothing but the musty detergent and city smells of her own slacks. Even with her shins to hold on to, her hands are shaking.

_There’s no way. There’s no way._

Enormous. Inescapable.

That was the fear she felt. That’s the fear she’s still feeling.

_What the fuck could that have possibly been?_

Because it wasn’t human. Not enhanced, even. Nor Inhuman. _Beyond_ human. The shadow of a human wrapped in layers of power that only have names in ancient legends and testaments—

 _Jesus. Maybe it’s another kind of God._ Thunder-guy but terrifying. Hellish. The whole devil nickname is finally making sense now, though it’s probably too late to change the stupid moniker she’s been running with. _This time it doesn’t even have a ride . . ._

_This time._

Maybe it’s her nature, or maybe it’s a coping mechanism, but right there in a heap at her front door, calves bleeding from capri-cutoff down thanks to the bushes, left ankle already swollen to the size of a golf ball and working its way toward lacrosse, she pulls out her phone and goes googling. Far beyond New York this time, she digs for her 1975 and 1990s culprits. She only scrapes herself to her feet when a word catches her eye and demands she limp to the table and her notes.

_Carnival._

The same one where her 1975 witness was attacked, the one with flamethrower guy and the skull helmet. _Helmet my ass._ Once called Quentin, like most of its kind the sideshow is now defunct. But it’s a name. And where there are names, there are leads. There is a trail to follow.

And how could she _not_ follow it? That isn’t who she is. And even if it was—

_“Anything?”_

_“Yes. Oh God, yes.”_

Even if it was, _It knew about Frank._

*

_Night Rider 7/27_

  * _Existing research: a being matching the description of a skeleton, on fire, with no clear mechanism for articulation has appeared in multiple places in the US, including Brooklyn and the area surrounding Cypress Hill._
    * _Other sightings have not been localized, but at least two corresponded to stops on a popular carnival and motorcycle circuit, Quentin._
    * _Quentin appears defunct, looks to have stopped for good in the Southern US. No online record of ownership, etc._
    * _As for worldwide sightings, other occurrences may exist, but references are too few too vague and uncited. Some evidence of deities or other beings originating in western Africa in early American slave narratives, not well documented._
    * _Having found minimal info in Brooklyn/NYC, Quentin is next most recent source._
  * _Encounter notes: I saw it by Fran|_



She has to pause, carriage return, start again. Stop herself thinking, write around the lump in her throat shaped like Frank’s name.

 _No, I should say I saw_ him _._

_I was thinking “it,” but that's not right. It's not just the clothes, or the voice, but there’s a sense of identity to this thing that he broadcasts. And in some ways, he was also recognizable.  I've never seen anything like that in my life, though, so how it could be familiar is the million-dollar question that I probably don't get the answer to._

_I mean, I think I used to have an incredible empathy for others, but sometimes I feel I've lost it, like everyone is just outside of a glass cage that I'm trapped in and I don’t know if I even want out anymore. But he reminded me of the same kind of, is it instinct? that I had about Frank, or that poor guy who kept confessing to the Sin Eater murders, or even Madani. That sense that_ something _in them is good. I used to be able to feel that. I felt it about whatever that thing is, just for a second before my brain started working again and I ran away screaming. My nose somehow hurts more than my ankle, I guess you can’t wrap a nose._

_But, it made sense to run. I can’t imagine anything scarier than seeing that thing again. I felt like he could scald my soul by looking at me._

_But, I don't think he's evil, either. I think that's my point: He's not a_ bad guy _. He’s not anything I have a name for._

 _Still, I have to ask myself, would it matter if he was evil, if he could lead me to Frank? I know I already know the answer to that, but I can’t bring myself to say it. Say that I'd willingly deal with the actual, living (?), breathing devil. Frank wouldn’t even want that._ I _don't want that. But I think what it said to me   means he's alive._ Frank is alive.

Alive.

_Alive alive alive._

*

 

Interlude:

THE RIDER

_It happens very slowly, the breaking, the pulling back from the air and the world, the melting into somewhere dark and raw and soft. Electric, sparking. And with the going of the Spirit, there reemerges the aching human backbone of the unit, the body full of broken soul: Loss. Rage. Fear, fear, love, despair. Remorse. Shards of cold._

_He breathes the humid air in gasps, and begins to understand he is in Saint Michael's. Familiar._

_There is a place in the grass that smells like whisky that should not be there, beside a monument to a family that wrenches the heart: regret, remorse, and the darkest feeling in the darkest corner of the mind where hell lives and breathes, the heat for the Spirit’s flames._

_There is also memory, a cry in the dark, in silence, in the depths. Unheard. And yet it calls._

_The body stumbles forward._

_A dead man emerges from a cemetery._

*

 

Research 101: start with back issues of news, get specifics, hit google. That's the long way and the hard way, but it's her way, and it works.

Karen begins with the library instead of work this one time, however, and rather than headlines, she starts with ads. “Carnival in town" or something to get her timeline. Most of the papers from before 1980 are microfilms, though. No easy search bar. No quick lookup. Just a lot of clicking, starting in January 1972 and begins working her way backward from July, knowing that date from the Stone article, until June 27th finally gives her the ad she needs: “ _carnival in town! Magic, mystery, motorcycle stunt show! July 1st-14 th_.”

A two-week window. She's seen worse.

She thus scours every paper from the 27th through the 14th hunting for any sign of disturbance during the Quentin's stay. A single mention of 4th of July partiers who were buzzed a la Top Gun by a motorcyclist—who'd gone so far as to set a sparkler off on his helmet—is, however, the only possible incident she finds. And it's flimsy. She has nothing but the Stone article. Not much to go on.

But there is, a few desperate, disheartened clicks later, a goldmine hidden among the dead ends that almost makes up for the lack of articles: a single posting of the carnival's other planned stops from the 12th.

Some of them are large cities. Some podunk towns.

Almost all would require a drive.

*

“If I told you I'd seen the rider with my own eyes, would you believe me?” the words are out of Karen’s mouth before Foggy can even say hello. She stands outside the café nail biting while he stares down her awkward greeting, probably taking in how insane she must be starting to look.

Finally, he sighs.

“You know, if anyone else said that, I might laugh them off,” he says, “but that is definitely the kind of shit that would actually happen to you.”

Karen leaps into hugging him, half strangling him in the process.

It's easier to stay calm after that. She can breathe again, and thus order, so they can sit over coffee while she talks. Some abbreviation of the why and the _extremity_ of the drinking aside, she tells it true while Foggy works from calm to a bit of a gawk.

“So, yeah,” she concludes. “Possibly the scariest thing I've ever seen and definitely not some guy in a costume.”

“Shit. Ok, well, I stand by the badass comment, but let’s definitely add terrifying. Do you think it was seeking you out?”

“No, I don't think so.” Though she has to wonder if they weren't in the same place for the same reason—the same _person._

“Well, that's good I guess. What are you going to do about it?”

“I'm . . . Working on that. I have a lead, there may be other reports that can help me understand him and what seeing him means. But it would be . . . kind of a road trip.”

Foggy's face does that thing where it almost flattens with doubt, lips pursed, chin pulled back.

“Can you even afford that?”

“I could make it happen.”

He gives her the eyebrow lift of the unconvinced.

“Riiight,” he says, drawing it out. “Let me try that again: maybe a better question is _why_ you have to chase this to the point of hitting your credit limit. I mean, you just said it's not like it hunted you down. You just went drunk walking in a _cemetery,_ Karen, and that's like _begging_ for spooky skeleton people to find you. Nothing personal—so, why not report the encounter and be done with it? Or, just be done. For all you know now you're on it's radar and anything you do next could piss it off. Why risk that?”

_Because he can lead me to Frank._

_“_ If I am on his radar, I'd rather at least know what it is I'm dealing with. Besides, maybe you're right about me. I keep looking for the people I lo—that I _know_ in these vigilante stories . . . Maybe chasing this one down and finding out what makes it tick will scratch the itch.”

“That's some seriously questionably psychology.”

“You think so?”

Foggy stares into his coffee.

“I think the reality is that extended road trip equals reason to get away you won’t guilt yourself about. And I actually think you _need_ that, but . . .”

“You think I’m running?!”

“What? No. Karen. I think you’re taking a break, and this is an excuse. Even though you don’t actually need one.”

“Right.” As if she's ever known how to slow down.

*

_Night Rider 7/28_

_I have two ways I could do this. The first is to try and run into him again in New York, knowing nothing but 1) skeleton 2) terrifying 3) fire and 4) he could know about Frank. The second is to drive halfway across the country, and possibly then some, and learn what I can about what he was like nearly 50 years ago. That sounds dumber every time I say it, but so does going in blind._

_So, which do I_ want _to do?_

_I think a week ago I'd have hated the idea of leaving, even for a story. All that time just alone in my head   I think it would be terrible in every possible way. Now I’m not sure._

_What matters is helping Frank._

_I'm guessing I can't just shoot this thing if it doesn't want to deal, or if it does but I don’t like the terms. And I feel like pouring water on it won’t do much but piss it off, either. So I have nothing. No trump card. No backup. I don't even know what he's really called. Night Rider is just a motorcycle pun I made up for a snappy article.  He could be a demon for all I know, or undead, or anything. I don't think he's evil, but he is absolutely dangerous. I could feel it. So, logic says go in with something, anything. But I doubt I have the luxury of time . . .  But maybe that’s just it._

She could give herself _one_ stop, _one_ shot to see if there's more to know, and if there isn’t, get back home, and go find somewhere scumbags due for penance hang out and see who shows up. Get it over with. Find out exactly what kind of deal it will take to find Frank. A limited window to gather whatever she can before coming in hot, hoping not to leave that way.

One trip.

One town on her list.

She packs her bag as she calls Ellison.


	6. Long Trip Shot

Ellison takes it like a champ, but for one reasonable question:

“What changed?” _Hope._

 “I found something to keep me sane if I did take a break.”

“Huh. Well take as long as you need up to a month. You write better sane.”

She laughs. “Thanks.”

*

 

Based on her limited information, Karen's best bet seems to lie in the fact that somewhere in the endless tree-separated fields of dirt that make up the Midwest in the winter, the Quentin carnival waited out their 72-73 off season. Somewhere called Gardenville.  

Having given herself one shot, that's where she chooses to aim it.

Getting there in the summer is more visually appealing than a winter of dirt, though by the time she arrives, having slept one night in a motel and two in her car in Walmart parking lots, the idea of ever having to lay eyes on a cornstalk again is repulsive.

The motel in town is nice enough, though. Clean, neat, just dated and cramped. The vertical wood paneling on every wall doesn’t help the 70s shab look any more than the faded rust brown comforters.

She spreads her wardrobe out on one twin bed, fights her way onto the WIFI while perched at the tiny laminate café table crammed into the corner, and takes stock.  The first place to hit is the local library, but it will be closed in less than an hour.

This will take far more than an hour.

Which is how she ends up with ordered in Italian food delivered by a man unquestionably Russian, devoured while marathoning Ghost Adventures in questionable quality on a TV nearly as old as she is.

She falls asleep somewhere in the middle of an episode about a deep south bridge, _should be more afraid of people than ghosts,_ her last conscious thought.

 

_*_

_Night Rider 7/30_

  * _Gardenville central library relevant archives:_
    * _1972, ad “Quentin Carnival Halloween Hoorah Sept. 30-Oct. 15"_
    * _1972 community announcement “carnival to winter in Gardenville"_
    * _1972 “Prank too far? Ghostly Rider terrorizes CR 4"_
      * _Previous “pranks" include terrifying teens on scenic drive Halloween night, lit candles and rider appeared shouting about summonings. Also a touring biker run nearly off the road, dared to race before being left far behind. Described fiery bike._
    * _Late Nov. 1972 additional sightings, reward for info on “Ghost Rider.”_
    * _1973 “Ghost Rider Gone for Good?”_
    * _Several police reports likely made between oct.72-jan. 73 though no headlines_



Once again, microfilms get the job done. By lunch, Karen is on her way to the Greenville sheriff's office with leads to follow.

The woman at the counter seems too modern for the shabby wood pulp paneled desks on the other side of the feeble barrier, no Plexiglas. Her hair cropped short and dyed in shades of seafoam, her uniform overlarge but cinched tight at the waist, only the utter nonpluss in her gaze reminds Karen of cops back in New York.

“Can I help you, ma'am?”

“I hope so. My Name is Karen Page, I'm a journalist with the _Bulletin_ in New York. I'm on the road doing a special on American folklore and urban legends, and from what I could find in the library, Greenville has a unique one. I was wondering if it might be possible to review any old reports of the, ah, ‘Ghost Rider' from 1972?”

The seafoam shaded deputy leans away from the counter, now demonstrating what might be real surprise, judging by the height of her eyebrows.

“Well, I can’t just let you loose in our files . . . but . . . I mean I guess I could sort through the archives and let you know what I find.”

“That would be _fantastic._ Thank you so much.”

A hint of bemusement tilts the corner of the deputy's mouth.

“Well, thing is, I can’t leave the desk on an errand until my partner gets back from lunch. You may be sitting tight a while.”

“No worries,” Karen assures her, and plants herself in a plastic chair along the wall.

The deputy introduces herself as officer Bailey while she waits, and leans over the counter to chat.

“New York, huh? How'd we end up on your radar?”

“There's a similar legend in Brooklyn, actually. That's how I first heard about it.  When I started sniffing around and heard the Gardenville version, I thought I'd come check it out.”

“You couldn’t google us though? You actually came all the way out here?”

“A headline or three from nearly 50 years ago can be a little more stubborn than that, almost no one ever publishes them verbatim. All I knew was,” _that some carnival parked here, “_ that it appeared on some questionable sightings pages online.”

Bailey snorts

“Pages like, Reddit creepypasta?”

“Think more. . . 90’s word art.” If it _did_ exist online, that is probably where she'd have found it.

“Lord.”

They share the brief laughter of strangers for a moment before the sound of the blade fan fills the room. Bailey fiddles with something under the counter.

“So . . . ‘Ghost Rider?’” she asks after a moment.

“That's what the papers on file at the library called it. Uhm, it's a legend of a skeleton? On a motorcycle? It's . . . Unique.”

“Creepy.”

_Like you cannot believe._

“I'll say.”

Ten more minutes pass before Bailey's partner comes in. He takes one look at Karen, and gawks at Bailey. She must look either very out of place, or like a very hot date, judging by his face. Bailey glowers at him.

“Roberts,” she snaps, and he jolts back to attention. “ _Finally_. I need you to take the counter, Ms. Page here is a journalist visiting from out of town.  I said I'd sift through the archives for her.”

“Whatcha researching?” Roberts—a skinny, freckled, barely grown man—asks while he plops some takeout on the counter for Bailey.

“American legends and ghost stories.”

“Oh, you here about the phantom then? Off country road 4?”

Bailey pauses in reaching for her takeout. “You've heard of this?”

“Sure. Old Johnson told stories about it at an officer orientation I went to last year.”

“Huh. _We_ just had the commissioner. It was boring as all get out.”

Roberts shrugs and looks to Karen.

“Have you talked to Blake Johnson yet?”

Bailey starts before Karen can reply.

“Roberts, Johnson is 70some years old.”

“And he loves telling stories,” he replies, without looking away from Karen, “Johnson was on the force back in the 70s, he saw all kinds of crazy you wouldn't believe. And hey, if Bails here is going to dig through all our reports from back then it'll take a while anyway, how'd you like his address in the mean time?”

“Roberts,” Bailey groans, but Karen is already halfway out of her seat.

“I'd love that, if you don't think I'd be a burden.”

“Nah.”

Bailey, sighing, admits, “he does like stories.”

Roberts scribbles her a map.

*

Blake Johnson lives in a fashionable-circa-1950 yellow house with windows overwhelmed by shrubs of a similar vintage. The paint on the siding is neat enough to render the porch especially shabby by comparison—once upon a time it may have been white. The windows have gone foggy in their corners. And not one inch of it feels uninviting—the peeling, decrepit **HELL IS REAL** highway sign half visible from the street due to the smallness of the town notwithstanding.

 _I'm starting to believe that,_ she retorts to the sign in her mind, and moves to knock on the door.

The screen door rattles on its hinges as the inner door swings open by a few inches. A more youthful face than 70 might warrant, pockmarked by psoriasis or years of wear but taught over a layer of chub in his round cheeks. He blinks bleary, dark eyes.

“Blake Johnson?”

He nods. “Can I ask who's askin'?”

“Of course. My name is Karen Page,” she does her reporter spiel. “Officer Roberts down at the station told me you might have some personal stories about a legendary ‘Ghost Rider’ near Greenville, would you mind terribly if I asked you a few questions?”

Mr. Johnson's eyes light up in such a way that six years drop from his face.

“Oh, sure! I love a good ghost story, come on in.” He opens the door and shakily pushes the screen open toward her, which she sidesteps. “Though, it's . . . Not the neatest in here I'm afraid. Old joints, and can't say I've been keeping house quite properly since Michael died . . .”

“I don’t mind in the least,” Karen insists. “And, I'm sorry to hear about . . .” _its small-town Midwest Karen, don’t assume anything,_ but Mr. Johnson fills the pause like it’s habit before she can just say “Michael.”

“My old partner,” he explains. “On the force together 20 years, lived together some 40, both bachelors you see. He passed about 6 years back . . . Always was running on ahead of me.” He winks with a stage actor's exaggeration. “I'll catch up when it suits me.”

He has himself a little laugh as he waves Karen in the door.

“Take a seat anywhere,” he offers, “you can pull the blanket off the couch if it's gotten dusty.”

“It seems great,” Karen says as she sits, withdrawing a notepad from her purse. Mr. Johnson gets halfway to sitting in a rocking blue recliner—definitely corduroy—before popping up quickly, if ungracefully, to declare he should offer her some water. She declines two or three times before he stops insisting and settles into his chair.

“Right, right,” he mumbles before refocusing on her face. “So, you wanted to hear about old Ghostie, eh?”

“Exactly. I heard you may have even seen the, ah, Ghost Rider yourself?”

“I did indeed,” he rumbles, settling joyously into the role of storyteller. “It must have been oh, early early 70s. I remember hearing about the first incident, bunch of kids went up the bluff to do a séance or play with a Ouija board or some . . . nonsense, when this motorbike of flame comes hurtling over the rocks, and on it ‘s this cackling demon kids said looked like a skeleton on fire. We all laughed at the time, it seemed a good prank and saved us chasing down the kids for leaving all their junk and joints up there. But then, people going up country 4 at night started coming back shaken, saying some hellion on fire was blocking the road, racing them, jumpin’ their cars, all sorts of odd stuff.

“Now, we had a traveling carnival with a bike show wintering near town, so the sheriff went out there and had a word. They let him look over their bikes, helmets, check all that for pyrotechnics, and their resident motorcycle jockey walked them through his stage wardrobe—some guy with a ridiculous stage name, Jimmy Blazes or something—but they couldn’t find a thing on them. So, next best we could figure, some ballsy kid had seen the show and gotten the idea. That was the thinking when we started posting patrols along the highway, anyway.”

Mr. Johnson's expression sobers, drawing deeper lines around his eyes and nose.

“Michael and I got the honor of that patrol sometime in oh, must've been about November. It was chilly enough. So we were sitting there freezing to our bikes up on the bluff, when this regular fellow on a chopper comes screaming up the hill at some unholy speed. Michael, now he just swore so his mother turned in her grave and took off after him. I wasn’t sure about leaving my post, but Michael could cause trouble with the best of them, so I went ahead and rode after him.

“Now, I was hauling trying to keep up with them, going 70 or 80 up this twisty little highway, when I come ‘round a turn and find Michael has turned back for some reason, still driving like a maniac, and we swerved so hard to miss each other we both put the bikes down and went sliding for some 20, 30 feet down the pavement. I ran up against the face of the bluff, Michael had to catch himself on a millage sign not to skid right over the edge down to the next switchback. I saw stars just like a Looney Toon!” he has a laugh at that, though Karen is a touch horrified.

“Why did he turn around?”

“Oh, we found out in a hot minute. _Real_ hot: from up over the ledge of the road where Michael was hanging, our phantom prankster comes flying up, skidding a scorch mark right into the road as he stopped. Now, that’s a 15 or 20 foot drop he sent that bike up, so we knew even as messed up as we were that this wasn’t a normal bike and a costume. _This_ bike was on fire, if not _made_ of it, and the rider? Burned right down to the bone with these terrible red-hot flames in his sockets and flame coming up outta his collar. He looked at us and—now, I can’t begin to do that voice—he ordered us, no uncertainty about it, to ‘leave him be.’

“We were petrified, and once he left, we had to call in a bus to get us back off that bluff.”

“Good lord,” Karen remarks. Mr. Johnson nods solemnly.

“Ghost Rider, as the papers all called him, got to be the stuff of legend eventually. We never stopped getting civilian reports here and there, but at some point, we also started getting raving criminal confessions instead, or worse, before sometime in February, it all just stopped as fast as it started. “

_Do I want to know?_

“What could be worse than being driven mad by a phantom?”

Mr. Johnson shakes his head, the look falling over his expression aging him all over. He must have been in his mid to late 20s when all of this happened, and his youthful moments can’t quite mask his encroachment on 80.

“We found folks . . .” he explains slowly, “It was like they were burnt out. Imagine a person without soul, like a . . . fleshy robot. We'd find ‘em like that, and judging by the screaming, whatever made them that way was no walk in the park.” Karen feels the pit of fear dig in under her breastbone, the sensation of sympathetic burning from looking into the rider's eyes prickling at her sense of physical memory.

“So . . . The Ghost Rider started out by hassling anyone and everyone and moved on to . . . Punishment?” _He really would know something about Frank._

“It seemed like it. Of course, folks would still run into him on the remote highways plenty like I said, for a ghost or demon, he was real scattered in some ways. Like there were two of him. Which I suppose is possible . . . Back then there weren't so many costume types running around. We weren't used to the idea like you probably are, living in the city. I've wondered since if he was really one of those and in that case, who the hell knows? There coulda been a whole super team.”

“ _Very_ fair point,” Karen remarks, aware that her tone is so dry it could fuel a wildfire, but unable to care.

“You know, come to think of it, I even have evidence for that thought after all these years!” Johnson adds, straightening in his chair as if electrified. “A few weeks ago I had a nice call from an old friend who retired out in California. Now, his granddaughter Staci is on the force in Los Angeles, and apparently, she's been chasing after something a lot like our old Ghostie, only she said something about it driving some souped-up car, not a fire bike.”

Karen’s brain sounds the red alert _._

“How many weeks?” she blurts. Mr. Johnson looks startled but puts what seems like genuine thought into his answer, humming to himself until he coughs. Karen is about to offer him a glass of water when he manages to speak.

“I think it was right about two weeks, but she's been chasing after him who knows how long. He's got a thing for the gangbangers out there, toasts them to barbecue. Better'n being a zombie, I suppose.”

“. . . That’s a completely different MO from your rider.”

Mr. Johnson nods sagely.

“Like I said, I think there's more than one of them. And one of em's not real nice, if you ask me. The others . . . I suppose they're out there on some mission. I heard there’s some Devil fellow in New York, too, you’d know better than me, but maybe Hell's just gone in on vigilante types.”

 _Oh God, Matt. Even out here._ But that’s a secondary, transient thought. The only thought that _matters_ is _There's more than one. There's more than one._

Which means all the research in the world can’t do her an ounce of good.

*

Karen stares into the paneled wall of her hotel room with a beer in hand, wondering if this was a waste or a breakthrough. She's got stacks of old reports from Bailey to corroborate Johnson's story. A little internet digging, too—the best results coming back in Spanish—has the Ghost Driver active within the last month in LA, so timeline alone guarantees that hers is a separate being. The lack of bike and cackling also sets him apart from Greenville’s rider, as does the lack of zombie. Which makes her rider a new entity, or at least one which has been on long sabbatical. There is no true precedent.

And even if there were, all she's got are stories of people getting their asses handed to them by bony fingers. No means of fighting. No weakness. Just a single commonality beyond appearance: vigilante bullshit.

But then, if there's one rodeo she's been tangled in before, it's that. At least in terms of finding him, she'd know exactly what to do. It's how to deal with a supernatural enhanced (with a possible attitude problem) and a flesh and soul burning capability that's a mystery, and now, she's at a loss for any way to solve it beyond the catch 22 of going to the source.

*

By noon the next day, she's checked out, gotten her coffee, and is on the road. A single cyclist in a dark helmet a little ahead, and a tractor behind, are her only company until she hits I-80. There's nothing much to leaving but the faded reminder in her rear view: **Hell is real.**

 


	7. Prey on the Hunt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for graphic depictions of violence in the form of bodies in a morgue.

_Interlude_

THE RIDER

_The soul has impulses. Pain. Cravings. Fierce, carnal desire. They drag him down beneath, letting the Spirit through for moments before he struggles back to the surface and retakes control. It causes pain._

_Every time, there is pain._

_He hunts without bloodlust for days. He remembers sleep in increments. He learns the freedom of the ride. In the depths of him, his heart beats out the rhythm of living and yearning, a light at the forefront of his mind he chases through the flames._

_But he cannot resist forever. He cannot say no to resurgent enemies in familiar colors. The Spirit overtakes him and scalds them with their sins. The flame engulfs._

_But for the man and monster beneath, even this is not punishment enough._

_*_

Back at work, she’s greeted by surprise.

“Karen? What are you doing back already?”

“It turns out road trips to the Midwest aren't great for brain clearing unless you find corn soothing.”

Ellison snorts.

“Could have told you that. Works out, though, your Rider thing is back and learned how to shoot.”

“ _What?!”_

_He's a phantom-demon with sadistic cousins, why the hell would he need a gun?_

“Yup. And whatever twist it put on it, it's got the cops _real_ attention. I don’t think they want to say enhanced yet, they're more in domestic-terrorist mode, but the coroner's report won’t be available for a few days, though.”

“Unless someone on good terms with her can get an unofficial prelim?”

Ellison opens his arms wide as if to usher in some great revelation.

“You read my mind. Can you get over there today?”

“Since all three things that came in when I was gone are garbage, I can go right now.”

“Awesome. Go tear this thing open, would you?”

Karen flashes him a smile.

*

Doctor Maria Duran doesn't have much tolerance for nosing around, but Karen's genuine curiosity and an offer early in their relationship to help her flip through some files to ID a strange substance in a vic's stomach contents (a black goo souring brown at its edges, which ended up resembling the contents of asteroid strikes) had gone a long way. The fact that her intuition had solved that little mystery on the quick side had endeared her to Maria enough for the occasional visit to be tolerable.

“Ah,” the doctor announces as Karen comes in just ahead of her tech escort, a good kid still in med school, “it's my space goo sleuth. Which bodies this time?”

Maria nods away her escort as Karen comes into the room, skirting everything with excessive distance for the sake sanitation, preservation, and some reluctance to actually touch anything in a body bag.

“Hi, Doctor Duran. A little bird at work told me you've got some interesting gunshot wounds in here somewhere.”

“Huh, scorch mark guys. Go put a mask on, it's something to see but not much of a party to smell.”

Karen scoots herself over to Maria's desk to trade her purse for a surgical mask while the doctor pulls three bodies out of cold storage.

The first bag is already unzipped when she makes her way over. She finds the mask only does so much to dilute the sour smell of human barbecue.

“All right,” Maria sighs, “so here's this. Take a minute to look and see what you can figure out before I spell it out for you.”

Reluctantly and with a churning stomach, she leans over the hole in the man's chest. He's a beefy fellow, late thirties or so, with a bushy red beard and permanent frown lines between his eyebrows. And a scorch mark far too big for the slug—a .45 or thereabouts—boiling the better part of his torso.

“What on Earth?” Karen mutters. “Is the exit wound . . .?”

Maria wordlessly flips him over. There is no exit wound.

“It gets better,” Maria remarks, her tone flatlined as her patient. “Come on over to the next guy, and get yourself a bucket if you think your stomach can’t take opening up a Y incision.”

“Oh, geez,” Karen answers, but she doesn’t get a bucket.

“I've got these guys in stages,” Maria explains. “I looked this fellow over for similarities to my current star of the show, and haven't dug around much. But have a look here.”

She peels back skin, muscle and fat from the vic's left side and chest. Karen's urge to vomit is overpowering: the sound is sticky and cracking, wet meat left in the refrigerator. And the smell is worse than ever.

“Fuck,” she mutters. Maria laughs briefly.

“What do you see?” she presses. Karen holds her breath to lean over a bloody, broken cartilage framed ribcage.

“It's . . . Scorched. The bones look burnt, they're even cracking. Where was the entry?”

“Look up.”

The bullet went in his throat, through another cultivated beard.

“This bullet fried him as far as the bottom of his ribs from his _throat_?”

“Yup. I can't wait to see what his brain is looking like.”

“Jesus, Maria.”

The doctor just shrugs.

“Brace yourself for number three, he's my rockstar.”

_Great._

Body three belongs to a heavily tattooed man with a gut shot. A Hell's Angels tattoo is barely visible beneath the scorched and blistered skin of his chest. _Well, that explains one thing._

Maria opens the body up. Right down to cracking open his pre-broken ribcage. _OhGodOhGodthesound—_

When Karen is able to look, the wrongness of it all is blatant even to her. The torso is hollow of organs shriveled by heat or burnt to ash, lungs black and collapsed around the empty space where a heart should be. She's reminded somehow of Johnson's words: _imagine a man without a soul._

“Good grief. It's like a bomb went off in him.”

“Or a fireball. What are you thinking?”

_I'm thinking I'm screwed._

“I think this wasn’t done by a gun in the usual sense. There may be a bullet, but it came in with literal fire power behind it, that or an awfully large muzzle flash, and it looks like it was designed to spread heat on impact instead of shrapnel. But it isn’t totally even . . .”

“Like it's got a targeting aspect, right? You could account for some of it with the varying density of different organs, but I suspect I’m going to find the same patterns in the other two even with different entry wounds and heat dispersal.”

“Exactly.”

Maria nods and nods as she rolls the bodies back into storage and strips her mask and gloves. “NYPD wants my report ASAP, and some fed type came sniffing around yesterday. Thoughts on _that_?”

“They're thinking specialized weaponry. Would you agree?”

“Are you asking me as Maria Duran, or Doctor Duran?”

“Both.”

Maria snorts.

“Of course. You're lucky I like your style, you know.”

“I do, and I appreciate it.”

 “Hmph. Well, the report I'm writing up is going to say _one_ thing, that I've never seen this before and it doesn't match any record I've been able to find. Done. They can do their own speculating.”

“And what you _aren’t_ reporting?”

“Off the record? I say I was 15 in 1990, and as stupid as kids were, word got around fast in Brooklyn back then that you stayed out of the cemeteries at night if you'd ever committed a sin. And this was coming from kids, not parents, wasn’t a scare tactic. I read that article you did, and I can confirm that flaming devil had palpable effects on those neighborhoods, whether it was truth or rumor. And I don’t think ‘specialized weaponry’ is what anyone needs to worry about. That kind of power doesn’t come from an arms supplier.”

“Fair enough . . . You said he goes after sinners, though?”

“They used to say he'd burn your soul if you were wicked. These guys,” she inclines her head sharply toward the lockers full of bodies, “must have messed up big time.”

“How big?”

“No idea, because I can tell you one thing: as spooked as we were, no one ever actually said word one about him killing anybody, not back then.”

“Then these guys were into the worst of the worst, or it was personal.”

“I doubt that one,” Maria snorts. “Well, then again, maybe he's pissed about their coining the Hell's Angel concept first.”

“Oh, hah, hah.”

It's a joke, of course, but a seed of curios intuition still takes root in her mind. _Can a phantom hold a grudge?_

*

The headline she runs with is “ _Night Rider Escalates Spree of Vengeance,”_ for consistency and the sake of not picking fights with the NYPD. She'd like to tack on “NYPD at loss,” but the fighting words would make a lengthy headline anyway.

_To think I started with OpEds . . ._

Ellison loves the insider take on the literal-fire-based firearms and the vics' affiliations and lets her loose on a week of research into Hell's Angels crimes as soon as she hands him the draft. “Follow up,” she calls it. “Whatever you want,” he replies.

What she finds in the archives for the Hell’s Angels is mostly drugs, but bystanders pepper their history with bodies.

Including the Castles.

_Oh God, I forgot they were there that day._

In the great bulletin board of her mind, one more flimsy connection between Frank and the rider string them together in red.

 

*

_Night Rider 8/12_

  * _Probable theories:_
    * _My rider is unique from the Greenville or LA riders and possibly newer given the differing MO and time lapse from the Brooklyn rider_
    * _The rider may be capable of holding grudges_
    * _The rider has multiple means of subduing and punishing victims (perpetrators?) and is capable of escalation_
    * _The Rider hates at least one of the same criminal organizations as were on Frank's original list, some 90% of which are already dead, but the rider may know where Frank is because they've worked together/have some kind of deal_
  * _Unexplained: why Frank is still fucking missing._
  * _Next steps: check in with the rest of Frank's old list, try not to die. I can't help him if I'm dead. I can’t be sure if he needs help if I’m dead. Self-sacrilege is a bad idea. Bad, Karen. “I'd do anything" has to have an upper limit. If death is it, at least get to the rider first. Maybe you'll get away with your mind if not your soul._



After all, she's done more than her fair share of sinning.


	8. Dead Men Tell All Tales

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canon-typical but add hellfire violence in this chapter.
> 
> Also, the name McGinty along with some of his backstory are a nod to Ennis' "Kitchen Irish" arc on Punisher MAX. Credit where it's due!

The Kitchen Irish. The Angels. Cartels. Billy Russo, if he ever wakes up.

Of that list, the Kitchen Irish are closest to home, and the least mobile aside from the comatose. So that's where she starts.

The first step—conducted after work with a tablet in front of her to finish what she's _supposed_ to be working on while she listens in and memorizes faces at Nallen’s Pub over a beer or three—is recon. How many of these guys have stepped from foot soldiers into the shoes of dead mob elite? Are any of them anybody?

The answer to that takes three evenings of stakeouts to find, long enough to befriend the dining area waitress, Connie. Younger than Karen, a born New Yorker with Irish parents and halo of course natural Black hair, she’s a cheery, friendly sort and tends to Karen with a golden retriever’s enthusiasm and a little sibling's mischievous distraction and doting. Though she usually doesn’t give out freebies.

Yet she shuffles over one night with a glass of mineral water Karen didn’t order, and leans in close as she sets it down. Karen is expecting “look at that beefcake at the bar,” but Connie’s commentary is far more urgent.

“Hey, you’re a reporter, right? Are you the TV kind?” she presses, trying to look casual to the point she just broadcasts “uncomfortable.”

“No, all print . . . Why?”

“Cause McGinty just walked in and he's not big on attention. Try not to stare anyway, ok? He can be kinda mean, even to patrons.”

“Oh. Thanks for the heads up. Which one,” Karen paints her expression with the sly smile of conspiratorial gossip, “is McGinty?” Connie pretends to giggle.

“That thick old hothead in the wifebeater. If he does notice you? You're my roommate and my ride home. He’ll probably take that. But seriously, you . . . really don't want to mess with him. He's old IRA type from Belfast. Don’t let the dad-bod fool you, age just made him mean _and_ stir-crazy. Don’t piss him off, ok?”

“Wow, gotcha. Thanks for the heads up.”

Connie straightens again, relief in her eyes.

“Any time! Oh, and Karen? Drink that water. You look like you need a detox.”

Karen groans.

“That bad?”

“Like you've never slept in your life.”

By the end of the night, McGinty makes a pass at some lady at the bar without ever glancing at Karen. But he leaves without her, and nevertheless, half the bar leaves with him.

_Gotcha._

To say she takes advantage Connie walking her to her car, fretting, by offering her a ride home. She chatters about McGinty's crew and their big drunk talk of a Kitchen takeover all the way.

_Recon complete._

_*_

Step two is to plant a seed and rattle some cages. Rather than publish her bait, though, she takes the _don't die you can't see him again if you die_ route and leaves a tip with the local precinct about domestic threats in Hell's Kitchen. That’s the way to word it if you want things done, after all. And only when the bulletin for “NYPD seeking information” comes out, does she play the press card, bringing it to Ellison with a short piece on criminal activity in the Kitchen in the last year.

Trap laid, Karen arrives thus at step three: wait, watch, and see whose bloody signature appears.

*

The pub isn’t actually a bad place to work. That it’s also the closest thing to a predictable front row seat to what, if anything, happens next, is in many ways a bonus. Karen haunts Nallen’s like a wraith for six days without regret, without disappointment, with the location despite mounting anxiety her trap will come up empty. That there is no correlation between the victims of the rider and the enemies of the Punisher. Six nights. Not knowing, scared of being right, terrified of being wrong.

On the seventh night, hell breaks over Nallen's like a wave.

10:00 pm. Tuesday. The happy hour crowd has moved out and McGinty’s crowd moved in. Connie hovers around Karen’s table like a bee around a flower, everywhere at once yet never far away, refilling her water glass faster than Karen can empty it. _She can feel it, too_. A tension. A foreboding. Karen sits over her glass with her belongings already packed into her purse, a bug-out bag for God knows what.

Hell’s arrival is not subtle.

With a roar, the doors blow open before the screeching tires of the plain black and chrome motorcycle equivalent of a muscle car.

 _Oh, here it comes._ Karen swallows to steel herself. She tenses to dive for cover.

She's going to need it.

The bike skids inside, coming to a sidelong stop that plows through the hostess stand, popping the wood like a balloon full of confetti, only more jagged, more like mulch. The bursting wood pulp scatters menus and seating arrangements. The rain of wooden collateral rattles almost louder than the screams. Of the shouts which greet this entrance, _what the fucking fuck?!_ rings the loudest. It just masks Karen screeching “Get down!” at Connie, grabbing the young woman’s hand as she rushes to Karen’s side, before dragging her immediately and unceremoniously under the table.

“Stay flat, ok?”

Connie nods, breathing too hard to speak, though her eyes are screaming the same _what in the hell?_ Sentiment as can be heard in the sound of guns cocking across the room. _I have to see this. I have to know._

Karen wriggles herself into position to pull her phone from her purse.

“911?” Connie asks.

“I don’t think that’s going to help right now.”

“What? Wait, Karen thenwhat’reyoudoi—”

While Connie tears at her arm, Karen inches her phone’s camera just past the edge of the booth beside her. The dark room renders the footage grainy, but she can see enough to tell what’s going on. _All that matters._

Outside of their hiding place, the hooded rider stands beside his bike, fists closed at his side without a word or movement.

“The hell are you?” someone demands.

The rider cocks his head.

“ ** _Vengeance_**.”

Someone mutters “fuck this.”

 McGinty, identifiable by his thick accent, bellows “ _just fucking shoot!”_

And gunfire reigns.

The details on her phone camera are fuzzy and her hand shakes as Connie sensibly cowers beside her. The table is bolted to the wall, leaving room for them to squash themselves together, Karen’s arm around Connie’s shoulder and her hand sunk into the dark coils of her hair to keep her head down. Karen watches the quaking footage of bullets tearing through the rider with as steady a hand as she can manage. What she can hear I almost more telling. Shouting and gunfire, that horrible familiar _pop pop pop_ only sharper, many of the shots whining in the air as they ricochet off his bike, glasses behind the bar taking the hits instead, exploding like fireworks, ringing like bells. The rider stands unflinching.

Someone finally charges him, to no avail: a man in an open jacket looking fit for a 9 to 5 rather than gangsterism lunges, gun blazing until it clicks empty into the rider’s face. The mobster is shorter than the rider, masking his next action. All she can make out is an outstretched arm. there’s gurgling, and a flare of light, the rider’s hood incinerating, stripping away his outer jacket to expose the silhouette that’s been branded into Karen’s memory, flame erupting in a supernova swell that creates a whiteout over the chocking gangster’s face—now lifted, his throat in a gloved, bony hand. A sound like a dying rabbit crackles up out of his throat, a scream for which there are no words, unholy and broken. The man all but leaks from the rider’s hand, collapsing to the floor trembling and weeping, a glow still in his eyes, incomprehensible gibberish—murmurs of prayer or apology—on his lips.

The next six men, the rider just shoots. The gun is so eerily . . . Normal, an average metal and plastic firearm, but it blasts compact fireballs, the bullets turned to comets that leave scorched craters where they enter and go nuclear where they land. Ice and heat come off each shot in waves that scald Karen’s phone hand. _Who knew hellfire was so cold?_

It scalds like liquid nitrogen.

It burns like napalm.

One more man the rider hurls through the window at a velocity which could surely carry him across the street, though a car alarm from outside says he likely didn't make it that far. Another comes in with a knife and finds himself pinned to a support beam screaming Jesus’ name and mercy before it becomes nothing but a shrill whine and his rolling, sparking eyes bleeding tears and blood alike until the rider puts a close-range gunshot through his belly in the same motion he uses to fire on another man coming up behind them.

One struggling, crawling survivor in the background makes for his bike. The Rider incinerates his head in a shot.

Karen ducks instinctively as the incendiary slug comes in her direction, screaming for one terrified, in-too-deep moment into Connie’s hair, curling around her and withdrawing her filming hand.

_Oh God, this is too much—_

While she's down, a man’s screams followed by boot-heavy footsteps fill the room. Screaming unlike the others, their souls frying, these cries are lower, bellowing and cursing and rabid, furious in their agony. _McGinty._ The footsteps continue as the shrieking first keens, then fades to either death or shock.

The footsteps thump again. Thump _closer._

_Oh, fuck—_

Karen shoves her phone down the front of her blouse before boots enter her field of vision, and the tabletop bolted above them is ripped, raining splinters, from the wall. Connie screams at a volume that makes Karen’s ear ring even as she throws herself across the younger woman’s back, protecting her head beneath her clasped hands as she looks up to search the face of death for a sign of mercy.

“Please,” Karen breathes.

The rider talks bellows over her—that voice again like the radio echo of empty space.

“ ** _Run._** _”_

_Hell’s angel indeed, Maria._

Coaxing Connie up, dragging her past the rider at what should be scorching proximity while she processes him by shrieking like a banshee, they rush for the door.

A dead gangster lays crumpled at the foot of an Escalade outside, the glass on the sidewalk glittering red. Karen tries to put herself between the view and Connie, though the girl’s rapid breathing suggests anything but calm, relief, or shelter.

_Stay with her._

_I should stay with her._

The thought is so quiet under the screaming urge to go back and get what she came for.

Karen and Connie make it three squares of payment before Karen pulls her purse off her shoulder, rips her keys out of it, and stops to shove them into Connie’s arms. The blood runs out of Connie's face.

“Connie, listen to me--"

“Wh—? Karen—”

“I have to go back, I know—I know—it’s work, Connie, it’s my job it’s—”

“ _You’ll fucking die!”_

“I won’t, I promise. But I want you to go to my car, ok? Get yourself home. Don’t wait here. Just drive away, I’ll come by for my things tomorrow, ok? Connie. Connie— _please—”_

Ashen, Connie shakes her head so aggressively her hair builds up momentum that continues to bounce it once she's still. “You’re gonna fucking die—”

“I really don’t think I am . . . now go, ok? Go!”

Karen steps aside, waves Connie on, and as soon as she’s surrendered by at least one forward step, Karen scrambles back to the pub door, and bursts through it. One side no longer hangs right on its hinges. It scrapes the floor, and knocks her a little askew.

It’s the first time she really _sees_ McGinty.

Heavy old-fashioned nails, like railroad spikes, mounted on the sides of each booth serve as coat-hooks at Nallen’s. Four such nails, still visibly red hot, boiling the blood welling around them, have been driven through McGinty’s wrists. Like a vertical crucifixion, his hands are pinned above his head to a support beam. The scalding nails have been bent back around his arms so he can’t tear away.

“Oh, Jesus Christ—”

And then the rider is behind her, leaving no more time for choking horror, only existential terror in the face of the skull like a cracking lava flow, black, charred bone cut with red, yellow, blue heat. The eyes that measure souls. Karen stops breathing for a moment. But she does not jump.

“What have you done?” she finally breathes. No answer. “Why—why _this?_ ”

Mandible barely cracking open, fire belching from between his teeth, he answers “ ** _A warning.”_**

“To the Irish. Why? Why them? Why the Hell’s Angels?”

He waits a long moment, staring into her until she can feel the heat of him in her heart. “ ** _Vengeance.”_**

_Bullshit._

Sense shuts off. Fury takes hold.

“I don’t believe that. _This_ isn’t _just_ vengeance. You can do penance, you can do punishment, this is _overkill_. It is _personal._ It’s  _revenge_. Who for, huh? For Frank? You know where he is, don’t you?” she’s leaning up into his face, inches away from tongues of flame and splintering bone, her vision swimming from something other than fear, her breath short with more than adrenaline. “What is it, are you working together? For him? What devil’s deal did he make with you? Or, you know what, I don’t care. I just want you to tell me he’s alright, that he’s at least alive. Tell me that much.”

The rider stares her down. His gaze in her core, from heart to the pit of her stomach, a hot spot at the base of her spine— _where is the human soul located?_ The sign in Greenville comes to mind again.

He could scald her down to nothing from the inside out, but doesn’t. But he offers little else:

All he gives her is one word.

“ ** _Why?”_**

“Because—”

The rider inclines his head toward hers, bringing them almost eye to eye. Her barely slowing adrenaline spikes back to a roar in her ears that almost drowns out his warning.

“ ** _To love Frank Castle is sin.”_**

He pulls away again, and Karen stumbles back as if readjusting to gravity. She can hear what he doesn’t say: this is the only warning she will receive.

_But aren’t we all sinners in the end?_

_*_

Karen stumbles outside to the sound of someone laying on a familiar car horn and her name being screamed out the window. Connie is waiting for her by the door, hands shaking on the wheel. She refuses to give Karen the driver’s seat.

“ _No._ Get in let’s go, come on!”

Karen clambers into the passenger seat of her own car, and Connie slams on the gas.

“Connie?”

“I can’t believe you went back in there. You’re going to keep looking for that thing too, right? Is that your big story? Is it?”

“Connie—”

“Tell me, Karen!”

Karen inhales and exhales slowly.

“I’ve been investigating connections between the gh—Night Rider, and other vigilantes in the area. I did a lot of work on both the Daredevil and Punisher coverage, and trust me it got . . . very up close and personal. A lot of experience went into my decision back there.”

Connie drives in frantic silence for a long moment. A furtive glance is the only indication she gives of considering Karen's words.

“You worked the Punisher case?”

“Yeah. Actually, I started out as a paralegal before I was a journalist . . . I did the research for his trial, and that’s what got me the job at the _Bulletin._ Digging up the complexities behind dangerous people is my specialty, I guess.”

“So . . . when I get out of this car, I’m right. You’ll go looking for that thing.”

“I’ll do my job.”

Connie’s hair bounces back and forth as she shakes her head.

“That wasn’t some guy in a costume—”

“I know. Believe me, I know. But his MO is similar to . . . patterns I’ve seen before. I need to know if there’s a connection.”

“You’re going to get yourself killed.”

“I’m going to try not to.”

Connie won’t say another word for three full blocks.


	9. Bar of Revelation

_What the hell do I do now?_

That’s the million-dollar question.  In her car outside Connie’s apartment, her head in her hands, Karen asks herself for the hundredth time how much sacrifice is too much for Frank Castle.

She has been warned.

She may not get another shot.

She has no defense.

She has little to lose.

She could see Frank again.

She could die trying.

He’d never forgive himself if she did. _I’ll never forgive myself if I turn back._

So it’s a selfish thing, that she asks herself how else, where else she could find her rider tonight before he disappears into the ether of Hell or Saint Michael’s or obscurity like his predecessors. That she withdraws her phone like a weapon and re-watches the bloodbath and firestorm with bile rising in her throat. She’s gotten steelier over the years. But this is death on tape. She will not be a passive observer. Karen makes herself feel every scream. Every burnt-up soul. Every heavy, flaming, slug lodging in human flesh. And she feels the rider—tries to see him as he is.

What she sees efficiency. She sees violence. She sees grace. She sees reflexes that make Matt’s look like slow motion, fearlessness born of imperviousness and something else, too. Like a man with nothing to lose, burning up bullets in atmosphere before they can impact his skull, walking into them as if he wouldn’t mind if they made it through. Tiny motions of awareness that betray human patterns of thought. As if there were a person in there, and not just empty bones.

Tiny motions like an inclination of the head as if to listen when, upon his arrival, several men run out the back, McGinty shouting after them.

Karen rewinds. Again. Again. Again.

The shouted word is _Warehouse._

 Karen blasts the car into drive as if she were the one possessed.

*

_Interlude_

THE RIDER

_The ringleader broils in a ring of cultivated hellfire. Screaming. Groaning. Half alive. And the soul resting beneath the burning Spirit whispers, never again, never again. An old rhyme._

_The soul leaves flesh to boil. It steers for the bike. It steers for the chase. It swallows up, takes over, drowns the Spirit’s flames beneath flesh. The heart aching, breaking, tender with memory, with closeness, with ringing voices, he drives in stealth at a steady pace toward the last reckoning of the Kitchen Irish. Toward Vengeance. Punishment._

Revenge.

_*_

Karen has a spare blouse in the back seat. She shakes her hair out. She stuffs phone and cards into the cups of her bra, knowing nothing in her purse can help like mobility should this become another firefight. She walks into the Warehouse Club as casually as she can muster with her hands still shaking from the showdown in the bar.

Three steps through the door, she can tell by the bartender’s face that she’s subpar clientele for this place regardless of blouse. The up down look the woman gives her is marred by revulsion and eye rolling. _Right. Gonna need a reason to be here._

Karen strolls up to the far end of the bar, furthest from the only other patrons, men shout-whispering over a large, secluded table ten feet from the end of the bar, where one more man sits silent with untouched beer in hand, his head bent low over his glass, his posture aligned away from her.

“Can I help you?” asks the bartender with a screwed-on smile. Karen tosses her disheveled hair.

“Uh, yeah! I’m supposed to be meeting my date here?” she cants her voice higher than it ought to be. “I’m running late and everything, but he never called me . . . have you seen him?”

“That guy?” The bartender—her nametag says Alyssa—asks with a jerk of her head toward the brooding man in dark colors at the bar’s edge. Karen aggressively shakes her head.

“No, uhm, mine’s a blond,” she says, talking around a bitten lip, “strawberry blond, bout 6’2”? He might be in riding leathers?”

Karen can see Alyssa’s teeth gritting.

“Can’t say I’ve seen him. Fortunately, it’s one of our off nights—that’d be why there’s no bouncer to keep the riffraff out—so you can wait her as long as you want,” it’s almost funny how much it pains her to say that, “as long as you buy a drink.”

Karen beams and orders a vodka-cran, hoping the well still has its undeserved reputation for being the drink of ditzes and spaced out barely-21-year-olds that it did in college. The more clueless she looks, the less interest anyone will have interacting with her in the kind of club where bouncers choose patrons by appearance and mob affiliation. The more lost she looks, the less question of her affiliation there will be.

It seems to work—Alyssa’s temple pops as she walks away to pour the drink. _Perfect. Clueless nuisance achieved._

Down the bar, the whisper shouting men escalate to plain shouting, McGinty’s name dripping like a death sentence off their tongues.

Karen doesn’t get her vodka-cran—Alyssa drops it as the brooder at the end of the bar declares “McGinty’s dead,” at a cold volume that turns the room to silence. That turns Karen’s knees to water and makes her grip the bar to stay upright even as tears of shock swell in her eyes.

It’s such a familiar voice.

“The fuck are you talking about?”

Frank’s voice stands. Frank’s voice says “you heard me. Now who wants to join him?”

A woman’s voice, Alyssa or someone hidden by the wall of testosterone at that table: “Isn’t that the fuckin _Punish—”_

“Worse.”

The flames rise with a roar, flash-boiling flesh down to nothing but bone. And the gunfire reigns. The screams sound. The return fire threatens Karen as she stumbles, stricken, down the bar, into the heat and the firefight, into the gates of what surely must be some level of hell. She’s conscious of Alyssa in the corner of her eye sprinting for the back as she slumps along the bar. It’s such a long way to walk, an eternity on her liquid legs. Long enough for the screaming to stop. For people to die. For the spilling of blood.

For the rider to turn on her, inches from where she wavers, flames a blur through tears that cannot quite disguise the fury in his fixed expression

“ ** _You—”_**

He may kill her. He may burn her. It is a tragedy she accepts. Lunging into his face, to almost kissing distance, staring eye to eye with heat rising in her heart, Karen makes demands of the Ghost Rider for the second time tonight.

“Give him back. Give me Frank Castle. _Now_.”

“ ** _Sinner—”_**

“Then I’ll join him in hell!” she snaps through tears. “Now, give. Me. _Frank.”_


	10. Sunrise at Midnight

THE RIDER

_The Spirit reaches, extends a hellfire stare to survey this stubborn mortal soul as this heavenpale creature calls out a name that throbs in the heart. Ache. Reluctance. Shame. Yearning._

_Hers is a soul of deep layers, some dark, fraught on the surface with resistance. Stubbornness . Determination. Fear. Unflinching, radiating lifeforce that battles her sins as much as disguises them. A soul that exhausts her. A soul that battles the Spirit in pursuit of a goal, a soul that devours her body in the process. Renders her faint, slack, a puppet, a doll with rolling eyes._

_A surging unseats the Spirit. It fades toward the dark electric place, sharing eyes and glimpses of feeling as it goes, as the body reaches to halt her fall, the hellfire mockery of a heart bursting whitehot._

_*_

Heat flashes through Karen and for a moment, she understands Hell. A nakedness, raw exposure to burning too intense to feel, and her most valiant attempts to resist, or even stay standing, fly out the door in the face of it.

_Frank—_

Darkness. For long moments.

She blinks back to consciousness with a warmth still churning in her heart. Hazy reaching for stability finds her palms against cotton, splayed over the broad uneven surface of a fleshless chest, falling into the gap between ribs and clavicle.

_Fight, Karen, fight—_

She unconsciously grips a rib to help pull herself upright and falls back again in horror to great to muster screams into waiting arms. The rider is _holding_ _her_ , arms around her back, and he responds to her reeling by pressing her more tightly against him.

It isn’t hot. Warm, maybe, but not hot. Human warm.

He's down to a smolder, more smoke than flame, and she's conscious of the give in his clothing where smoke and sparks alone hold a human shape around bare bones, her body so close to his she feels encased, like she’s sliding into the concave emptiness beneath his ribs. What little fire _is_ left remains only in his core, buried in deep sockets, highlighting weaknesses in the bone from within. Cracked ribs like sunspots. A single, clean, thinly healed pockmark on the right side of the skull—a familiar bullet hole that steals her breath and pulse like a sudden drop, brings tears again when she should be feeling terror.

“Frank?” she wheezes.

The skull tilts, down and away, as if past her, as if through the floor or through spacetime. A thousand-yard stare even without eyes.

“ _Frank_.”

Karen gathers her watery legs beneath her and throws her arms across the jagged layers that make up the rider’s shoulders: the heads of his collarbones dig into her as she splays fingers over ribs and vertebrae through his jacket. She stays clinging to his hollow bones until a hand—a solid, human hand—comes to rest against the back of her head, bringing with it the realization that the digging-in of bones has ceased, her arms cushioned by flesh which has resurfaced. Frank’s flesh.

She jerks just far enough away to see his face.

_It’s you. It’s really you._

_Oh God, it’s really you._

Frank—with the most exhausted eyes she's ever seen despite his having not one visible scrape on him—looks back at her with a fear like a caged animal beaten beyond retaliation, cowering in her arms. She digs her fingers into his shoulders to make him that much more real—maybe to let him know that _she’s_ real. It takes her minutes of silent stuttering to speak, after all.

“What . . . Frank, what . . .?” Karen manages to whisper.

Frank shakes his head. He swallows twice before he speaks, she counts the bobs of his Adam's apple, every flex of every muscle, every flinching sinew in his jaw and neck.

“Karen. Not here. You need to go.”

“ _No._ ” through leftover tears, Karen turns herself to steel, moving her hands down to his and gripping them almost hard enough to break his fingers. “Don’t you dare tell me to get out. If I go, I go with you.”

“ _Karen—"_ his voice cracks over the plea.

“No, Frank, I swear to God I will . . . I will wait until that thing takes over again and I’ll, I swear I will handcuff myself to your _fucking arm-bone_ if I have to. _I go. Where you go._ Do you understand me?”

Those tired inkdark eyes flash something that tightens her throat. It’s the same way he'd looked at her the very first time they met, in the hospital when she'd dropped a photograph of his family in his face like an offering, or a dare, to an angry god. A glint she can't name but which feels to her like a spotlight, placing her center stage. His temple pops as he grinds his teeth.

“. . . Ok,” he finally chokes. “Ok.”

“Thank you.”

“You got your car?”

“Out front.”

He nods. “K. You drive. I—you drive. Fast, I blew out their cameras but I don’t know for how long.”

She doesn’t need telling twice. Still clutching one of his hands, Karen yanks him toward the door.

*

“Get across town,” is all Frank says for several minutes once they're in the car.

“ _How_ across?”

“Off the island . . . Try Brooklyn. “

He adds the last part like a reflex.

“Because you like Brooklyn, or _it_ does?”

Frank flinches as if she's stabbed him, shaking his head in the passenger seat so long it seems she won’t get an answer before he reclines, closing his eyes, and admitting “hard to say" to the ceiling.

“Fine. Brooklyn. “

“Wake me when we get there.”


	11. Fire and Brimstone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> LOOK, CUDDLES!

_Interlude_

THE OTHER

_Past midnight, he assures himself, is a perfectly good time for ramen and stir fry. He's got case files to review after dinner besides, and he's run on minimal sleep for so many years that his body is resigned to it anyway._

_He's carrying his dinner to the table when it abruptly turns so hot in his hand he doubles over a little just to cradle the offending palm, upending noodles and vegetables across the kitchen linoleum._

_As he stands there, clutching his own hand, in more pain for a single instant than he's been in decades, he finally has to admit it: he cannot stay uninvolved._

_He needs a word with Karen Page._

*

Frank is a homing pigeon for diners. Karen wakes him on the bridge—having to shake him to do it—and despite the reeling feeling of tiredness playing over his face, he points her clearly and concisely to an older neighborhood, buried within which is the kind of family diner which has assuredly been packed by church crowds on Sundays, teens until their curfews, and night owls with their books and papers or laptops since time immemorial. And, of course, the occasional ilk of Frank, blending in among late night drifters.

The exterior of the building could benefit from a facelift. On the inside, it's been well balanced between modernism and the classic diner look with metal edged tables and bright chairs. Big enough to pass as a chain diner, it's easily the least hole in the wall place he's ever taken her.

A hostess--also playing cashier this late in the evening--seats them in a booth along the wall, well out of the way of one other couple at the booth closest to the kitchen. Brings water, coffee. Karen orders nothing else, finding she lacks the stomach to eat. Frank orders a flight of plain pancakes to justify their presence.

 Silence ensues.

Karen doesn’t want to have to speak first. In fact, she refuses.

Frank downs half a pot of coffee before dragging his hand down his face and meeting her eyes over the top of his fingers. There are no circles, nothing to indicate sleeplessness, but his gaze is still so wrenchingly tired.

“Ok,” he says, pulling away his hand and resting his forearm on the table, “where do you want me to start?”

Her stomach turns. She swallows bile.

“What is he? It?” she counts her breathes before and after speaking. She feels like china, or glass, ready to burst into shards at this table as the truth catches up with reality, now that her adrenaline is down.

“More of an it, on its own. It's a . . . Spirit.”

“Of?”

“Vengeance. They,” he pauses to measure her reaction to the plural before moving on, “attach, or bond, however the hell you want to put it, to a human soul and do exactly what it sounds like they'd do.”

“By killing?”

“That's personal preference.”

Karen somehow finds it in herself to grown before dropping her head into her hands. Frank almost manages to smile. A brightening in his endless eyes.

“Right,” she mutters, “so you're telling me that soul-toasting vs. barbequing vs. gunfire is subjective. And the ones who don't kill?”

“Probably the stare.”

“Explain,” she says, stealing a long drink of his coffee.

“Look into a soul hard enough and you can make it look back on itself. See every wrong it's ever done. Every sin it carries. Turn that into a punishment? Make them live all that pain they've caused.”

“This is an insane conversation.”

Frank snorts. “No argument there.”

Silence again. The waitress-hostess brings more coffee and extra cup for Karen.

Finally, “Frank, why the bike?”

“I have no idea. Human legs are too slow, I guess. And a bike can go more places than a car.”

“Where _is_ your bike?”

“Around.”

“Around?”

“The Spirit gets attached, and the bike gets a mind of its own. Don't ask.”

Karen blinks thrice before surrendering that one.

“Right. Bike is around. What else can it do, besides autonomous vehicles?”

“Other than scorching souls?” Franks corrects with such an edge Karen winces. “More than I know. Flame, heat, obviously. Scare the shit out of people. And some nasty . . . I don't know. I know there are things it can do I haven't needed to.”

“Such as?”

“Not things human beings do to human beings. Like I said, I don't know.”

Karen crosses her arms, trying to look firm, trying to hold herself together.

“What do you know? Do you know how many there are? Where they come from?”

“A corner of Hell as old as life itself, as far as I can tell. How many are loose at once, not my business. There's a kind of . . . Shit, it's like a memory but vague. You know? Almost like a dream or an instinct about what's what for it, but it's like holding back a rabid dog. It only knows how to do one thing and only ever has one goal, doesn’t care why, doesn’t care how.”

“How do you hold it back?”

“Try and hold it down until it has no choice but to let you step in and take over.”

Karen holds herself a little tighter.

“Do you control it, or does it control you?”

“Depends. When it's driving I can give directions, that's it.”

“Can you take back the wheel?”

“If I'm stubborn about it. Like I said, Karen. Dog.”

He downs some more coffee. She bites into her lip as if tightening the muscles in her face will help her better wrap her brain around this insanity.

“For a long time,” he offers, “I didn’t know to try. I was a passenger for . . . Shit, weeks? Climbing around in my own head to get my bearings, try and figure out where it began and where I end, no idea I could get back to the surface and steer. I think I looked for a way . . . First time I came to I was in Saint Michael's. “

Karen can feel herself blanch.

“I don't know,” he adds, “what finally got to me.”

She digs her nails into the table with one hand, covers her face with the other. _No, enough crying, enough—_

 _“_ Whoa, Karen. Hey. What . . .?”

He reaches reflexively for her hand and retracts just as quickly, instead gripping his coffee cup with an itchy trigger finger.

“Oh my God,” she sputters. “You were _right there._ You were _right_ fucking there . . .”

“Wait, were you--?”

“You were right there and I _ran . . .”_

Whatever he says next is lost on her, drowned out by the alternate history playing in her head. She could have had him back right then. That instant. She could have, she could have—

Karen doesn’t know she's hyperventilating until Frank is in the booth beside her with his hand on her cheek and his forehead pressed to hers, grounding her to the reality she's living instead of picturing, murmuring her name until she comes back to him. She cups her hand around the back of his neck to hold him there.

“It was the smartest thing you could have done,” he mutters. “And you gave me something to chase, ok?” he speaks directly into her hair. “ _Ok?_ ”

“. . . Ok.”

“Atta girl.”

She allows her hand to slide down to his forearm, and he pulls away enough to look at her.

“I almost can't believe you're alive. I've been chasing Gh—the Spirit for weeks convinced it could lead me to you but now that you're here, I feel like I'm dreaming.”

“Maybe you should be.”

“What is that supposed to mean?!”

Frank actually chuckles, just a bit. Low in his chest where she can feel more than hear it.

“Means you’ve got the story chasing eye circles again and you look like you've been through hell. Well, close to it.”

“I blame the Spirit for that.  You don't take cover under a bar table and come out clean. Thanks a lot for that.”

“Is that where you were? All I remember is recognizing your face and being too torn between ‘get her out of here’ and every other thought in my head to do any steering . . . Wait, did you chew that thing out to its face at some point?”

“Twice, technically.”

“ _Jesus,_ Karen.”

“That's pretty much what I thought, but since when do you keep me around for my cautious good sense and willingness to back off?”

Frank shakes his head, a sad smile again flickering in his eyes if not his mouth.

“Shit, I missed you.”

For a beat nothing happens but the weight and warmth of the words, before Karen leans in the kiss the corner of his mouth.

“Take me home, Frank. I think we both need to sleep.”

“All out of questions already?”

“Not on your life. But maybe I need to digest.”

“Fair enough.”

And take her home he does, though he takes the wheel as if he expects it to burst into flames and drives as if it's too hot to hold.

“You're coming up when we get there.”

“I figured.” He doesn’t smile, but his tone speaks volumes.

*

The last time Karen's apartment felt this much like _home_ was nearly two months ago. Frank makes straight for the couch as soon as they walk in, Karen turning to exhausted pudding at his side.

“Don't even think about it,” she orders without force. “Bed.”

Frank is already stripping his shirt by the time he reaches the mattress, and collapses over it. Karen staggers up behind him, pulling the clothing from the floor and pressing her face into it.

_Ugck—go figure._

“Frank.”

“Hm.”

“Everything you're wearing smells like brimstone and barbecue.” _And I'm trying really, really hard not to think too hard about why barbecue._

“Not surprising,” he mutters, rolling over onto his back to undo his belt and zipper, kicking his pants off.

“ _All_ your clothes, I'm guessing.”

“C'mon Karen, at least buy me dinner first,” he jokes, but when she returns from the bathroom and the t-shirt of his she's been sleeping in, he's sprawled naked, face first into the mattress, with no apparent shit left to give.

“’might have some sweats for you,” she slurs over her exponentially increasing, delirious exhaustion. Frank just grunts.

Karen wavers for a moment at the bedside, and crawls in.

“Blanket?” she offers. He grunts again, remaining on top of the duvet. With it between them, a soft and forgiving barrier, she rolls over to brush her hand through his hair. He turns his face out of the mattress to face her with heavy lids. He feels for her in the dark, tracing her arm, to cup the back of her head in his hand and draw her close through the blanket, forehead to forehead and hand in hand into a comatose sleep.


	12. The Ghost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I don't apologize.

Frank remains unconscious for 31 consecutive hours. The first Karen hears of him is the shower running, rousting her from a fitful sleep on the couch. It had felt uncouth, somehow, to climb back into bed beside him while he was so deeply unaware of his surroundings.

She has coffee ready when he emerges, lazily clad in sweatpants and a hoodie she'd tracked down for him. _Good. Staying for a while._

“Morning sleepyhead.”

“How long was I out?”

“A little more than a day," she replies, glancing at the clock.

Frank swears and drags himself to the coffeemaker. The two of them lean against the counter together blowing on the average- American elixir of life in silence for minutes on end. Karen studies him over her cup. He's still waking up, hooded lids over glassy eyes, but his posture is strong and poised. Completely . . . Unhurt. Untired. The one apparent advantage of flash boiling away every shred of soft tissue: it comes back good as new.  She supposes the slug she knows was once buried as shrapnel in his shoulder must be gone. Burnt or blown away. There are so many scars she suddenly, desperately wants to count, unsure if they'll still be there, or if, like some hellish phoenix, he's been made anew.

Though if he has, somehow, it still doesn't seem worth it.

Minutes pass.

“Hungry?” Frank asks after a while.

“I could eat a bite. Or a horse.”

“Read my mind. You have opinions on waffles?” The mundane-ness of these conversations. The weight of how much she missed him crushes her heart until she struggles to breath, and she mumbles her answer.

“That . . . they take too much effort to make.”  _Do not cry. Do not cry about waffles. Do not cry about the symbolic meaning of waffles and having him home damn it Karen do_ not--

Frank chuckles.

“Well ,mix yourself a mimosa or some shit and wait, then. You got a waffle maker?"

“I'll get it."

"Like hell you will." He takes her coffee from her hand, sets it gently aside, and pushes her back against the counter until all hope of assist is blockaded by his body. "My treat. Keep that coffee coming, that’s all the help I need.”

Karen pulls herself, mostly by his shoulders, onto the counter as acceptance that offer, poised to keep watch over the machine. But as frank steps past her to dig the waffle iron from the cupboard, she reaches for his hand. Just to clasp it for a moment, feel his could-kill grip return hers with tender firmness. He pauses to kiss her hair before pulling away.

*

Frank has definitely eaten more in a serving than he does today, but it’s hard to remember exactly when.

“Eating for two, I guess,” she mutters over her own empty plate as he drops back in his chair, his battle with the waffles finally ended.

“Something like that. Takes calories to regenerate all your organs, or some shit.”

“Oh, God, Frank.”

He shrugs, lifting his lazy head a little.

“I don’t know how you can be so calm about this,” Karen murmurs.

“Yeah,” he says, sitting forward and staring down his empty plate like Nietzsche’s abyss, “Well. I knew I wasn’t signing up for Disneyland.”

_Signing up?_

Karen fixes him with a look she hopes conveys the depth and scope of her hesitant dissatisfaction with such a teaser of a comment. Frank meets that look with what she imagines is a visible lump in his throat.

“. . . Just spit it out,” he chokes after a moment of visual stand-off. “Twenty questions? I owe you that. But if that’s what’s coming, let's get it over with. I feel like you're gonna be less thrilled with more answers, so just do it."

“Like ripping off a Band-Aid, huh?”

Frank swallows hard, and nods by ducking his head toward his shoulder, gaze fixed on a point of infinity somewhere near the edge of the table.

“Ok,” Karen says. “Then let’s just go back to the beginning. How did this _happen_ , Frank?”

Still staring into eternity, Frank replies without emotion or inflection.

“Hell loves to haggle.”

Karen gags on disbelief, finally dragging his eyes back go hers with the sound. Liquid dark eyes staggering in their sincerity and the things that haunt him so raw in their depths.

“Hell. As in, fire and brimstone and demons Hell. Actual Hell.”

“Or something that looked just like it.”

“ _Jesus,_ Frank.”

He shrugs and sits back in his chair. His Adam's apple bobs over forceful swallowing as he looks at her. Like he's waiting on a time bomb. For her disbelief, maybe. But the subtext gas been there since the beginning—Queens Devil, **Hell is Real** , all the fire, all her questions of what she would be willing to do for Frank Castle.

“Is that a surprise?”

“A month ago I would have said you were out of your mind. But, that was a month ago.”

Frank nods. That countdown to doomsday look is still on his face. _What are you—_

“Wait."

He closes his eyes, bracing for the question to come. _Maybe I don't want to know, maybe I don't want to--_

"How the fuck did you get to Hell?”

Tick, tick, tick, say his endless eyes upon opening, fixing on her. Waiting. Waiting for her to read it in his face, and lose her mind. Tick, tick,

_Boom._

Karen can feel the blood leaving her face.

“Frank. How.”

“The usual way.”

_No._

“ _Excuse me?_ Ok, no.Don’t bullshit me—That’s impos—you are not telling me—Frank I slept beside you, I could feel your heartbeat through the mattress so that’s bullshit, you—you could not--"

_But I'm looking right at you and you're so alive._

He shakes his head, looks askance, at her, at nothing, back to her, a vein twitching in his neck as if his own heartbeat is too much to take and she wants to scream over what’s coming next but she can't because her voice is gone and she's forgotten how to breathe, and he's already speaking anyway. All gravel. All pain. The shaking, terrible rage of a trace of _fear._

“Frank . . .” she tries to choke, but he speaks right over her.

“Come on, Karen,” he rasps. “Why do you think they get called _Ghost_ Riders?”

Because it sounds cool. Because it sounds scary. Because it looks good in a headline because they look—

_Dead._

Because Frank, her Frank, is dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BEHOLD, the END . . .
> 
> _OF P A R T O N E!!_
> 
> This story continues, broken in two for thematic reasons, in DANCE MACABRE, the next installment in this series. There Frank, now found, goes back to being a daily feature of Karen's life even as the spirit he harbors tears her worldview apart. AKA angst, drama, operatic love, and the fate of souls when their mates ~~~just might be damned.~~~~


End file.
